DATE=10/11/00
TYPE=BACKGROUND REPORT
TITLE=YUGOSLAVIA / MEDIA
NUMBER=5-47152
BYLINE=EVE CONANT
DATELINE=BELGRADE
CONTENT=
VOICED AT:
INTRO: Radio Television Serbia was considered the mouthpiece for the authoritarian government of ousted Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic. But as V-O-A Correspondent Eve Conant reports from Belgrade, Yugoslavia's new, liberated media is reporting on the new President Vojislav Kostunica in a way that resembles its flattery of the old government.
TEXT: During last Thursday's popular uprising that brought Vojislav Kostunica to the presidency, protestors set the television building on fire, destroying one of the strongest symbols of the Milosevic government.
But Radio Television Serbia is back, and workers there say it has a new, independent face, liberated from the propaganda it had to broadcast in the Milosevic years.
/// RTS NEWS BROADCAST - FADE UNDER ///
But now, instead of the name "Slobodan Milosevic" at the top of the news, the name is "Vojislav Kostunica," and it is being heard over and over again. A new independent media, but just as slavishly supportive of the new president as the old.
Bojan Bosiljcic -- a cultural editor at Radio Television Serbia -- was the first to announce to the Yugoslav people, on air, that R-T-S had been taken over by independent forces. But he says journalists of the old guard, while they say they are reinventing themselves, are proving incapable of independent reporting.
/// BOSILJCIC ACT ///
They are doing their job with a new attitude of course, but this is a moral dilemma. Can you have a new attitude after seven years of molding public opinion in one way, and then all in one night, how are you able to make such a change?
/// END ACT ///
Mr. Bosiljcic says part of the reason President Kostunica is figuring so prominently on the airwaves is that no one in Serbia has seen what he looks like. He never had access to state media during the election campaign. But mostly, he says, it is inertia -- the journalists are accustomed only to one way of reporting. He says it is ironic that all of the sudden they insist that they support President Kostunica and democratic ideals.
/// OPT /// Many of the journalists, who had been most supportive of the Milosevic government, refused to give interviews. "People are afraid here," says a foreign news editor who would not give his name.
/// OPT /// The former R-T-S director general still remains hospitalized after angry crowds beat him brutally outside the building before setting it on fire. Family members R-T-S workers accuse the director of ordering R-T-S employees to remain in the building when it was bombed by NATO forces in 1999, killing 16. /// END OPT ///
Danko Novovic has worked at R-T-S for 36 years as a news editor and anchorwoman. She says she was always in the opposition within R-T-S, but yet managed to keep her job when other, more outspoken journalists were dismissed en masse.
/// NOVOVIC ACT - IN SERBIAN - FADE UNDER TRANSLATOR VOICE OVER ///
People are particularly irritated because in recent years we've been the television for one man and his party. The danger here is that having left behind one form of one-track journalism, that we could cross over into another form.
/// END ACT ///
But Milivoje Calija, program director at B-92, Belgrade's leading independent radio, has little sympathy for R-T-S workers like Ms. Novovic who say they have suddenly switched to objective journalism. He says some of the journalists who broadcast for state television during the wars of the Milosevic era themselves deserve to be indicted for war crimes.
/// CALIJA ACT ///
It's very similar like the situation with German soldiers during the process after the Second World War. There are so many soldiers and officers who can say, "ok, the general told me to kill those people and make those concentration camp. I just want to say there are so many people in R-T-S who were in key positions and I think that their responsibility for atrocities is very close or similar to the politicians.
/// END ACT ///
Rade Veljanovski is a former worker at R-T-S and a member of the Social Democratic Union. He describes media coverage in the days following the uprising as "understandable euphoria" but adds that the new leadership might not be as democratic as they try to appear.
/// VELJANOVSKI ACT - IN SERBIAN - FADE UNDER ///
He says, "for example, the first night the media was liberated, one member of the democratic opposition sent one of Belgrade's most biased journalists to begin broadcasting for them."
But other key figures in the new government have publicly complained about the overly-flattering coverage of newly inaugurated Vojislav Kostunica. Zarko Korac, president of the Social Democratic Union told B-92 radio, "it's clear the media is reporting in too 'uniformed' and 'biased' a fashion." He said, "it personally sickens me. It is not wht we want. We are seeking criticism towards us, criticism towards society. We are seeking a real, open media." (Signed)
NEB/EC/JWH
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